Page category:

One of the major themes of this book is worlds within worlds, the idea that the miniscule becomes vast the closer you come to it.

Set in a small county somewhere north or west of The Big City, the book revolves around a house with five faces -- designed to be a super-display-model, each face of the house being a entirely different make and style. This house is a veritable house of Time, with four stories, fifty-two rooms, seven chimneys, and three-hundred and sixty-five stairs, it was built by John Drinkwater at the turn of the century (20th), and occupied by four successive generations of his progeny.

Really, this is a wonderful book, with its feet half in this world, and half in the Imaginatory. It won the world fantasy award in 1982 and well deserves its recent reissue. John Crowley, the book's author, has established a very lucid cadence for his characters, which, while not as vivid as Marquez's in his Hundred Years, still come across with enough vitriol and complexity to rouse interest, and compel us down the sometimes vague and lacking but altogether amusing storyline.